chapter title authors · amy diehl jeff grabill douglas walls stacey pigg overview this chapter...
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CHAPTER 4
TITLE Collaboration and Graduate Student Professionalization in a Digital
Humanities Research Center
AUTHORS Jim Ridolfo
Martine Courant Rife
Kendall Leon
Amy Diehl
Jeff Grabill
Douglas Walls
Stacey Pigg
OVERVIEW This chapter presents narratives of graduate student experience,
framed by the history, purposes, and collaborative research goals of
the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center. The authors
argue that these narratives provide English studies professionals with
a unique view of how a research center can contribute to graduate
student professionalization. The research center model, adapted to fit
other contexts, can offer graduate students valuable collaborative
learning experiences, especially when students participate in
community-driven research projects.
TAGS center, collaboration, community, composition, development, digital,
graduate, infrastructure, professionalization, projects, research,
student, writing
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES Jim Ridolfo is an assistant professor of composition and rhetoric at the
University of Cincinnati. His work has appeared in Pedagogy, Kairos: A
Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, JAC, and the Journal
of Community Literacy Studies. Jim is the winner of the 2008 Kairos
Scholarship Award for Graduate Students and Adjuncts. His current
book project with David Sheridan and Tony Michel, titled The Available
Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy for Multimodal
Public Rhetoric, addresses issues of rhetorical practice in teaching
new media.
Martine Courant Rife is a professor at Lansing Community College and
also an attorney. She is currently working on three book projects: a
monograph, Mediating Heuristics: Examining Copyright as a Problem
of Rhetorical Invention, and two edited collections, one with Dànielle
Nicole DeVoss and Shaun Slattery, Copy(write): Intellectual Property
in the Writing Classroom, and the other with Kirk St. Amant, Legal
Issues in Global Contexts. Her research examines intersections
between law, rhetoric, and professional communication. Martine is the
winner of the 2007 Frank R. Smith Outstanding Journal Article Award
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from the Society for Technical Communication. Her work has most
recently appeared in Technical Communication Quarterly, IEEE-IPCC
Conference Proceedings, and IEEE-TPC.
Kendall Leon is an assistant professor of English at Purdue University.
Her research interests include research methodology, cultural rhetoric,
new media, and community engagement. She has also served as the
director of a women’s center and has worked with several community-
based organizations as a grant writer, crisis line advocate, and Web
editor.
Amy Diehl is a Web content manager at Hampshire College. She also
freelances as a Web designer and writer. Her research interests
revolve around the rhetorical and pragmatic tensions of user-centered
design and usability practices in the implementation of Web content
management systems. She is also interested in issues of accessibility
and infrastructural limitations in computer education for adults and
non-native English speakers. Amy’s writing has appeared in journals
such as Technical Communication Quarterly and IEEE Professional
Communication Society Newsletter.
Jeff Grabill is a professor of rhetoric and professional writing and co-
director of the Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center
at Michigan State University. He is interested in the knowledge work of
citizens, users, workers, and students within organizational contexts.
Grabill has published two books on community literacy and agency
and articles in journals like College Composition and Communication,
Technical Communication Quarterly, Computers and Composition, and
English Education.
Douglas Walls is an assistant professor at the University of Central
Florida. Douglas's work theorizes and traces access as moments of
accessing enacted by people, tools, and cultures across professional
and personal lifespheres. His work on this subject has appeared in
Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Kairos, IEEE-
SIGDOC Conference Proceedings, as well as Computers and
Composition. During his time at Michigan State University, Douglas
was a Research Assistant for Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE)
Center as well as designer and instructor of MSU’s first hybrid First-
Year Writing class.
Stacey Pigg is an assistant professor of rhetoric and composition at
the University of Central Florida. Her research interests include digital
rhetorics and professional writing, as well as cultural rhetorics, and her
recent research examines the rhetoric and writing practices of a group
of coffee shop writers. Publications include a chapter in Cheryl Ball
and Jim Kalmbach’s Reading and Writing New Media.
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Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies
Collaboration and Graduate Student Professionalization
in a Digital Humanities Research Center
Jim Ridolfo
Martine Courant Rife
Kendall Leon
Amy Diehl
Jeffery Grabill
Doug Walls
Stacey Pigg
My own view is that our graduate programs generally don’t do enough to
professionalize students, in the sense of socializing them into the confusing and
intimidating mysteries about how you get ahead in this business. – Gerald Graff,
2000, p.192
The directors, graduate assistants, senior researchers, and affiliates of Michigan
State University‘s Writing in Digital Environments Research Center (WIDE) work
on a diverse range of collaborative, externally funded projects, ranging from grant
projects funded by entities such as the National Endowment for the Humanities
and the Institute for Museum and Library Studies to contract work for units and
organizations both inside and outside of the university. In this chapter, we
explore how the work of a digital humanities research center relates to graduate
student professionalization, addressing questions such as
What does a research center add to the total offerings of a graduate
program?
What do graduate students learn from being a part of or leading a
research team?
How might research centers like WIDE prepare graduate students for
various professional roles?
What can graduate students learn about their professional lives as
academics—and how can they develop professional identities and
capacities—from the work possible in a research center?
Additionally, while issues of graduate student professionalization in rhetoric and
composition studies have been addressed in terms of writing centers and
teaching assistants (Hattenhauer, 1982; Hoberk, 2002; Horner, 2000; Miller,
1997; North, 1984), none of these scholars have examined the multifaceted role
of research centers, largely, we suspect, because there have been so few
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Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies 114
research centers in rhetoric and composition and relatively few in the humanities.
Our approach will center on narratives of graduate student experience, framed by
the history, purposes, and collaborative research goals of the WIDE Research
Center. We argue that these narratives provide English studies professionals
with a unique view of how a research center can contribute to graduate student
professionalization. The research center model, adapted to fit other contexts, can
offer graduate students valuable collaborative learning experiences, especially
when students participate in community-driven research projects.
While for some collaboration may simply mean team members working together,
in a digital writing research center like WIDE, collaboration is woven together with
community engagement and outreach in essential ways. We think that the
narratives we present in this chapter are indicative of an increasing trend toward
collaboration and infrastructure development in the digital humanities (see for
example the global collaboration that is part of our recently funded NEH Digital
Humanities Start-Up Grant work: Archive 2.0: Imagining The Michigan State
University Israelite Samaritan Scroll Collection as the Foundation for a Thriving
Social Network). We argue that these collaborative community-outreach
experiences all share a common thread: the cultivation of long-term, intensive
working relationships and concern for shared infrastructure development and
management. In light of the sort of knowledge work students will perform after
graduation, it is increasingly important for rhetoric and composition and digital
humanities graduate programs to provide students with opportunities to engage
in collaborative endeavors and to develop experience in project management
and infrastructure development.
THE WRITING IN DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS (WIDE) RESEARCH CENTER
The WIDE Research Center is rooted in the larger discipline of rhetoric and
composition. It investigates how digital technologies change the processes,
products, and contexts for writing, particularly in organizational and collaborative
composing contexts. As an organization, it works to support research on digital
writing and writing-intensive knowledge work in a range of community and
organizational settings and with attention to issues of culture (see Figure 1
below).
http://wide.msu.edu/content/archive/http://wide.msu.edu/content/archive/http://wide.msu.edu/content/archive/
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Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies 115
WIDE partners with business, industry, government, education, and community
organizations to identify projects of mutual interest and concern. The center is
affiliated with but not governed by any one academic department; supportive of
academic programs but not embedded in any graduate or undergraduate
program; and most importantly, flexible, fast, and entrepreneurial in operation.
WIDE pursues grant-funded research in collaboration with colleagues across
campus, seeks research contracts and entrepreneurial opportunities, contributes
significantly to scholarly literature in various fields, and supports undergraduate-
and graduate-student research. Therefore, WIDE‘s relationship with its local
partners—departments, programs, majors, and the like—makes it unique within
the field of rhetoric and composition and within the humanities more generally.
WIDE‘s role is to move faster than programs and departments are capable of
moving, take risks that faculty members operating individually cannot easily take,
and create spaces within the academy and within departments and programs for
new forms of inquiry, learning, and professionalization. Conceptually, the center
has taken up the problem of how to study writing given new and changing digital
and networked information technology tools and environments. Fundamental to
our approach is the development of information and software tools as a research
deliverable. This development work is conceptual because it is a function of (and
Figure 1. WIDE Web site.
http://www.wide.msu.edu/
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Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies 116
feeds into) our theory-building work. It is relevant to this chapter as well because
development activity is central to graduate student experiences with the center.
We see the development of software, therefore, as a way to test our developing
theories of writing, as well as a way to address the needs we see emerging from
our collaborative research efforts.
We orient to writing in particular ways as well. We study writing as a verb, which
means that we are interested in the activity of writing. Studying writing as an
activity entails asking how we can best do it and how we can help others to do it
better. We understand the activity of writing to be carried by a broad semiotic
(multiple media), and we understand the activity of writing to be epistemologically
productive—that is, we situate ourselves within a rhetorical tradition that
understands writers as producers of new knowledge. We are interested, in other
words, in what writing does, not in what it means, and in the social and
organizational functions and impacts of writing, not in the meaning and
interpretation of the texts themselves.
This contextual information provides a brief overview of WIDE‘s unique structure
and mission; additional information can be found on WIDE‘s ―About‖ page. Now
we will shift our focus to how the center functions as a space for a certain kind of
graduate student professionalization. We argue that the research center provides
a distinctive set of professionalization experiences for graduate students. From
the establishment of content management systems for university-community
collaboration (Kendall) to the acquisition of independent servers (Jim), these
professional experiences share common elements: collaboration and attention to
infrastructure and space.
BUILDING COLLABORATION: PROFESSIONALIZATION IN EVERYDAY
INTERACTIONS
Kendall Leon
My tenure at WIDE officially began in spring 2005 when I worked as an hourly
research assistant on the Teachers for a New Era information modeling project, a
research initiative of WIDE‘s that studied the writing practices of teachers and
teacher educators in order to build writing platforms to support such work. I
eventually became the WIDE graduate research assistant in the summer of
2006. After my research assistantship ended the following year, I continued to
work on an hourly basis as a graduate assistant with WIDE, developing and
delivering community media workshops to nonprofit organizations up until spring
2009. At that point, my dissertation research and writing took me into a different
http://wide.msu.edu/about-the-research-center/http://www.teachersforanewera.org/
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Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies 117
area of inquiry: a historiographic project that investigates the rhetorical strategies
of a Chicana feminist organization.
To most, the connection between my research on Chicana rhetoric and my work
at the WIDE Research Center may seem tenuous. There is, however, a common
binding thread that exists at the less visible level of practice. From observing and
participating in day-to-day interactions among the people I encountered while
working at the research center, I learned the practice of community building. For
me, the most profound take-away from my WIDE experience was not explicitly
taught; instead, it was modeled by the co-directors in their interactions with our
collaborators from the university and the local community. In order to effectively
and responsibly develop sustainable research projects, WIDE always started with
and focused on the people involved. The work of any project, then, included not
only surveying relevant literature or developing technology but also participating
in the meetings, phone calls, and face-to-face conversations that helped these
projects come to fruition. This knowledge has shaped my own practices as a
scholar.
It was, in fact, my interest in the practice of building communities that led me to
become a WIDE research assistant in the first place. In spring 2006, I took a
course called Community Literacies, which Jeff Grabill co-taught with Ellen
Cushman. After the course, knowing that I desired practical research experience
in communities and technologies, Grabill invited me to assist with a research
initiative that WIDE was undertaking: the Capital Area Community Information
initiative (CACI). WIDE had been tasked with the redesign of a community Web
site called CACVoices (see Figure 2 below). The purpose of CACVoices was to
serve as a community portal of sorts, where community members could access
information about and for the greater Lansing area, including health statistics and
programs, neighborhood information, and community events. The site also
functioned as a Web hosting space for community organizations, most of which
lacked either the technical expertise or money to run their own sites. The initial
home page and site design were fairly clunky and jumbled, and as a result the
Web site was not user friendly. The site design also allowed for little visitor
interaction aside from the few organizational representatives who knew how to
work on their sites. Part of the vision of the redesign was to support the work of
community organizations and to allow for some visitor interactivity: registered
members would be able to post comments, contribute to forums on community
issues, and add event items.
https://www.msu.edu/~cushmane/commlit_0104.htm
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Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies 118
The site‘s first iteration was hosted and maintained by a staff member at the
Ingham County Health Department. The administrative responsibilities for
maintaining the site, running usability testing, and implementing a redesign were
too big for one individual to handle, which is where WIDE came in. As a first step,
WIDE conducted a study that investigated what the work of community
organizations actually looks like. Specifically, three researchers conducted a
summer-long qualitative study of two community-based organizations in Lansing,
Michigan, charting their writing projects, infrastructure, and technology. I joined
the WIDE team through this research experience. Subsequently, I was hired as
the part-time research assistant for the 2006-2007 academic year and as an
hourly employee for 2007-2008.
At times, my job at WIDE was frustrating. Some of what I encountered was
completely foreign to me, and I felt like I had taken a fast-moving jump into
technological literacy. I also felt as though I was unable to contribute to the
center‘s technological knowledge, and, at the end of the experience, I cannot say
that I consider myself a technology expert. What I did learn, and what I will focus
on for the remainder of my section, are the ways in which research centers like
WIDE give graduate students opportunities for professionalization that have less
to do with technology than with building relationships through teaching and
collaboration. Although I will focus on my experience working on the community
Figure 2. Redesigned CACVoices Web site.
http://www.cacvoices.org/http://www.cacvoices.org/http://www.cacvoices.org/
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Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies 119
media project, I had ample opportunities to work on other collaborative projects
with other students and faculty, including one project that entailed developing a
digital electronic resource hub for K-12 teachers. I also co-authored several
collaborative documents including grant proposals, an article, and a technical
specification document. Finally, along with other graduate and undergraduate
WIDE project team members, I presented at four national conferences.
To return to the CACVoices project, one of WIDE‘s explicit goals for the
CACVoices redesign was to make more visible the relationship between the
CACVoices site/project and the Capital Area Community Media Center
(CACMC). This in part stemmed from a recognition on the part of a few of
CACMC board members that the CACVoices site needed to be seen as a
community effort and not as a project supported by institutions like the County
Health Department and/or the university. As part of my WIDE research
assistantship, I became increasingly involved with the CACMC.
On behalf of the CACMC, another WIDE project I participated in was to
coordinate and facilitate free community media workshops throughout the greater
Lansing area. In general, these workshops focused on developing the
technological capacities of community members and nonprofit organizations and
included working with digital imaging software, content management systems,
blogs, and vox pop radio broadcasts. To do so required planning the curriculum
and managing the publicity for these workshops. It also entailed producing writing
associated with forming the organization and creating its public face. Much of this
latter work—the writing of the CACMC—necessitated intensive distributive work.
The distributive work involved facilitators, board members, community locales
where the workshops took place, and, through WIDE, several undergraduate
research assistants and myself.
While working on these interrelated projects, I became especially interested in
the relationships that comprised these activities. Working closely with Grabill, I
noticed that many of the community members involved were ones with whom he
had spent years fostering relationships prior to the start of any of these projects.
When examined longitudinally, the CACMC and CACVoices projects actually
began years ago, when the co-directors developed relationships with the
community partners. These relationships were vital to the research center as a
whole. As a research assistant, I saw the co-directors work hard to build and
keep these connections. They made careful and considerate decisions about
what would seem like mundane details: where to hold meetings, how the
meetings should be run, which students should work on projects. And they
shared resources with their partners in a variety of ways. For example, as the
http://www.cacvoices.org/organizations/cacmchttp://www.cacvoices.org/communityresources/CACMC/Radiorganizing/VoxPop
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Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies 120
research assistant, I was asked to provide free Web site work to a local non-profit
consortium on behalf of WIDE. The consortium was not directly related to the
CACMC, but several of the people and the organizations involved in the
consortium could be linked in some way to the CACMC. I also helped draft grant
proposals for a local women‘s center and volunteered at a farmer‘s market and a
neighborhood tour for an area neighborhood organization.
What I learned about these relationship-building practices of sharing resources
and of doing unacademic work like setting up tables or grabbing drinks is that
they actually play an integral role in research projects. Forming relationships
takes a significant amount of time and effort and requires the closest care. This
invisible work actually builds and maintains research projects and communities,
but it is oftentimes left out of the research project descriptions we read. During
my tenure working with WIDE, in particular with the CACMC project, I learned
that even though the emphasis may be on technologies and digital writing, the
true work of such a center is building the infrastructure to enable this work—and
this includes, more often than not, the people involved. More so than any other
professional behavior, the importance of people—of maintaining relationships, of
treating people and the places and things that they value professionally and
respectfully—was consistently modeled to me by the WIDE co-directors. I am not
just talking about the kind of respect and reciprocity that is debated in many
community-based research articles; I am referring to the everyday interactions
that help establish sustainable relationships of care and trust. As graduate
students, we are often not privy to the small, incremental steps it takes to be
good scholars, teachers, and administrators.
ENVISIONING INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE THROUGH COLLABORATION
Martine Courant Rife
I completed my Ph.D. in December 2008 after working at WIDE as a graduate
research assistant for about two years. I am now a tenured writing professor at
Lansing Community College (LCC) located about three miles away from the
Michigan State University (MSU) campus. At LCC I coordinate technical and
business writing and teach those same classes, plus courses in the first-year-
writing sequence. I am working on three books about issues of composition and
copyright, and I am working on a number of other research and writing projects
all connected in some way to my dissertation as developed during my
employment at WIDE.
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Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies 121
I developed my dissertation project while working on a WIDE-supported research
project examining the intersection of composition and copyright (see Rife & Hart-
Davidson, 2006). This dissertation project turned out to be the foundation for my
career‘s scholarly trajectory. During my time at WIDE, I worked collaboratively
with staff and students, participated in the administration of the center, and
organized several events for the center. I worked on research projects such as a
content audit and analysis of the Web site for the National Council of Teachers of
English, and I played a key role in writing a comprehensive recommendation
report on the results of that research. I also worked on a study based in social
psychology literature that examined how public writing versus private writing
impacts one‘s perception of one‘s self. During my time at WIDE, I worked on
several grant proposals as well, including participation in managing the complex
internal and external workflows of high-stakes proposing. Part of my job included
developing an awareness of budget and other infrastructural concerns that
impact the center‘s survival. Preparing quarterly and annual administrative
reports for the vice provost also gave me increased awareness of infrastructural
issues (DeVoss, Cushman, & Grabill, 2005).
I was able to observe research-in-action and saw the results from one of the
center‘s research projects: Visualizing Composition, led by Bill Hart-Davidson,
Jeff Grabill, and Julie Lindquist (see Hart-Davidson, Grabill, & Lindquist, 2010). In
the project, research participants kept diaries as they completed class
assignments. Their work was then transposed into a software application where
one could literally see each writing event play out. I was also able to observe the
composing process as I learned to use Morae, a screen capturing software, and
thereby saw computer-mediated writing processes in action.
Like working in a writing center, when working in a research center one gets to
―understand the importance of prioritizing tasks‖ (Clark, 1988, p. 348). I learned
to self-prioritize multiple tasks I was working on simultaneously. For example,
when the WIDE Research Center‘s first conference on digital knowledge was
taking place, a major report authored by the center was due. At the same time, I
was asked to work on future projects. Meanwhile, student workers had to be
organized for the conference, along with program packets, last minute food
arrangements, and transportation to and from the airport for conference
presenters. I had to work hard to learn to prioritize my work on several parallel
projects, alongside my own coursework.
Working at the research center also allowed me to work directly with outside
clients with much more control over who I worked with and what that work
constituted than I had experienced in service-learning coursework. I had ample
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/%20papers.cfm?abstract_id=918822http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/%20papers.cfm?abstract_id=918822https://www.msu.edu/~hartdav2/forms/viscomp.icform.pdfhttp://www.techsmith.com/morae.asp
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Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies 122
opportunity to develop civic values, improve learning, and become a self-
motivated learner and worker (Matthew & Zimmerman, 1999, p. 385). When I
drafted reports and press releases for the center, I understood my audience
included not only those in composition studies but also community members and
individuals within the MSU community who had no background or training in
rhetoric and writing. As I worked at the center, I became adept at sensing where
attention was needed, and I had the freedom to work on projects I felt would
most benefit the center and promote its mission. Because I quickly realized that
the center‘s success would speak to the more general success of research in
writing and composition studies, I felt a deep sense of responsibility to engage in
activities that would facilitate the center‘s success.
The ability to see the infrastructure that supports the teaching of writing through
programs, institutional entities, offices of deans and vice provosts, and university
relations or ―creative marketing‖ and its control over university-generated press
releases was one of the most invaluable aspects of my position at the research
center. One of my duties when I began at WIDE was to promote the center‘s
work and make the center visible both within and beyond the MSU community. I
learned, however, that the institutional identity is carefully controlled, and
approved channels were already in place that filtered and reviewed press
releases. I learned to navigate this system carefully, and I admittedly
experienced frustration when the dissemination of information was slowed and
even sometimes quashed because of institutional policies or selection processes.
Because WIDE is positioned in the humanities, in MSU‘s College of Arts and
Letters (CAL), a number of paradigms were continually challenged by WIDE‘s
business-like mode of operation. WIDE had outside ―clients‖ and received
payment from them. Such payments had to go into university-related accounts
and be administered within pre-existing infrastructures. WIDE also generated a
continual and substantial amount of grant proposals—a new challenge for CAL,
which did not have a research budget expert or an expert on forthcoming grant
opportunities as did social-science-associated university enterprises. All of this
behind-the-scenes work had to be completed by the co-directors and staff, which
was not necessarily the best use of their time. I was able to see, however, how
institutions can be changed from the inside out as I watched and participated in
the making of a new space in CAL where grant proposals could be processed in
MSU‘s existing system.
The key lesson I learned from working at WIDE has to do with institutional
change. I think that institutional change is usually very difficult and never
achieved in a straightforward fashion. I think back all the time to the kinds of
http://www.cal.msu.edu/http://www.cal.msu.edu/
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barriers faced by those at the WIDE Research Center as they moved forward in
their mission. Some of their achievements seemed, at the time, small and
insignificant, like gaining a single additional office area. Now that I am in the
position to create institutional change in a different setting, however, I can see
just how challenging and complicated even the smallest change is. I remember
events from working there all the time and draw on those experiences as I try to
move forward at my current institution.
COLLABORATION, USABILITY, AND USEFULNESS
Amy Diehl
I completed my master‘s degree in digital rhetoric and professional writing while
spending two years as a research assistant for the WIDE Research Center. I
currently work as the Web content manager for Hampshire College in Amherst,
Massachusetts, where I oversee all content on the Hampshire Web site and
associated Web sites. In my duties I work as part usability specialist, information
architect, content editor, content management system coach, and Web designer.
Much of what I learned from my time at WIDE has deeply influenced my success
at my current institution.
I worked on a number of complex projects during my two years at the center. The
primary project, Capital Area Community Information (CACI), was a research
project studying and redesigning a community resource portal and Web hosting
site for community organizations (see Kendall‘s narrative). The site originated as
a collaboration in 2000 between the City of Lansing and the Ingham County
Health Department for the purpose of creating Web resources to inform residents
about issues vital to community well being. The goal of this effort was to increase
the use of data and information in decision making by residents. The belief was
that a writing space where community groups and non-profits could also post
their own information would further achieve the goals of facilitating community
growth and well being. I worked through WIDE to facilitate a three-year research
study of (1) how community organizations and community members use
information technologies to do knowledge work, and (2) how CACVoices as an
information technology can be made both more usable and useful to the
communities it serves. I participated in two formal usability evaluations, led the
redesign of the CACVoices Web site based on the findings of both usability
evaluations, and conducted field work at two community nonprofits to research
how these organizations conduct writing and communication work and how
information technologies are utilized.
http://www.hampshire.edu/
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Because I worked so closely with the community members involved in using the
CACVoices Web site, I felt a true responsibility and need to work ethically and
fairly to ensure that the redesign addressed their needs and was in fact more
useful and usable. Because I worked on the project for almost two years, I felt a
deep sense of the importance of the work both locally, for those community
members, and more globally, with regard to the lessons the team learned about
the complexity of designing information technology for diverse community groups
in order to promote well being.
I also worked on a geospatial mapping project that was launched in response to
a need by these same organizations and citizens regarding the usability of
current geo-spatial mapping programs. Grassroots is an asset-based mapping
tool designed with the express purpose of creating an information technology that
creates complex maps for use in community projects and with a target audience
of non-expert users (Diehl, Grabill, Hart-Davidson, & Iyer, 2008). Through my
work on this project, I was given the opportunity to learn about and theorize
research in ways that might otherwise have remained invisible to me. By talking
with other research assistants, as well as the co-directors, I was able to
collaborate on research articles, initiate and facilitate projects, and receive
invaluable feedback, reassurance, and support from those much more
experienced in the business of research than I was.
Finally, I served as a board member of the Capital Area Community Media
Center (CACMC), which was also mentioned in Kendall‘s narrative. The CACMC
is a formation of community members in the Lansing Tri-County area as well as
Michigan State University faculty and students who are working to ―create
democracy through media‖ by forming a regional nonprofit whose mission is to
support the media creation of community members and community nonprofits.
In my work with community groups, I also had the opportunity to work with
students outside of the institution. I supervised several undergraduates who were
assisting with the editing and interface design of the CACVoices Web site. By
supervising a collaborative writing project with these students, I was able to both
achieve the goals of the project and mentor the students as they found
themselves facing the complications of real-world work: deadlines, collaborative
differences, troubleshooting, and the balance between theory and reality.
How do these experiences compare with what an English studies graduate
student might encounter in the more traditional professionalization context of a
writing center? One of the benefits of working at a writing center is to observe
and thus reflect on the composing process—to see real ―writers in action and to
http://www.cacvoices.org/organizations/cacmchttp://www.cacvoices.org/organizations/cacmc
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gain insight into how writing actually occurs‖ (Clark, 1988, p. 347). At the
research center, we were able to observe writing in wholly unique ways and ―in
the wild.‖ In my WIDE-related work at the Usability Center, for example, I was
able to observe and research how real users interact and write with information
technologies while they perform typical tasks. And my observation research for
the CACVoices project exposed me to collaborative writing—such as monthly or
annual reports, grants, and newsletters—and a composing process beyond the
academic context. The writing processes I observed in my community-based
research most closely resembled the very types of writing work I was also being
asked to do within the research center, such as collaboratively written usability
reports, requirement documents, development blogs, grants, and research
articles.
The key lessons I took away from WIDE were related to issues of usability and
usefulness. For a content management system to work, for example, it must be
usable to the content creators, so they can in fact do the very writing work they
have been tasked to do. A primary function of my job is meeting with content
creators to assist them in their own writing work and adapting the technology and
workflows to better serve their individual needs. The Web site itself also must be
usable, and we have begun iterative usability testing to ensure that the end-users
also find the Web site meets their expectations. How to make technologies useful
is also a primary take-away from my time at WIDE. Useful content, like the
mapping tool I worked on at WIDE, must also be born from the end-users‘ goals.
Listening to the users‘ suggestions and studying what they most often ask of
admissions counselors or what they most often enter into the search box have
helped in revamping the Hampshire Web site to offer a better experience to the
user.
COLLABORATION AND THE NEED FOR DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Jim Ridolfo
I started working at the WIDE Research Center in the fall of 2003, the first
semester of my graduate studies in Rhetoric and Writing at MSU. WIDE had just
received startup funding from the MSU Foundation, and so, economically
speaking, the center began to exist within the College of Arts and Letters. WIDE
existed in 2003 as a university account, two co-directors, one IT staff member
(me), and one administrative support person; without physical space the center
could not begin to grow and live up to its potential. Without physical space, the
center lacked the ability to provide any infrastructure and support for the kind of
http://usability.msu.edu/
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large-scale, sustained, collaborative digital research projects we wanted to
tackle. This became known as ―our space problem.‖
For my part, the directors wanted me to create server infrastructure local to MSU
where we could control our own domain name services, utilize static IP
addressing, provide a range of customized development environments for our
digital research projects, and offer a wide range services for teachers and
students at the departmental level such as listservs, blogs, wikis, MySQL access,
FTP space, and CGI/PHP-capable Web space. I was tasked with providing
support to our unit that went far beyond the level of support available from the
college and university IT infrastructure. Having had several years of prior
experience working with servers, this task didn‘t pose specific challenges for me
in terms of server technology. For me, the real challenge was the lack of a
permanent space to store the servers. We had no space.
In 2003 I approached the chair of the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures
department, and I asked him for any closet space he could spare. He was able to
provide, for an undetermined amount of time, a windowless closet with a working
Ethernet drop, and I spent the next two days sweeping up the peeling paint
chips, cleaning out several hundred pounds of Americana, 16mm tape reels,
arcane audio/visual equipment, history text books from the 1970s, a framed copy
of the Bill of Rights, and other remnants of a department. I transformed two
audio-visual carts into a mobile server room on wheels. Heavy uninterruptable
power supplies (UPSes) went on the bottom shelf next to oversized CRT
monitors for diagnostics; refurbished Sun Sparc and PC servers salvaged from
the scrap metal pile at the university surplus store went on the middle and top
shelves. When the space transformation was complete, we had a clean,
functional server room on wheels, and as it turned out, those wheels proved
invaluable.
The following summer the storage closet I spent two days cleaning out was re-
assigned to an adjunct faculty member, and so the year of musical chairs with
servers began. On several occasions, I would, at 2:00 a.m., move the servers to
a new location: sometimes the office of a senior faculty member on sabbatical,
once another utility closet. MSU‘s network service provided me with twenty-four
static IP addresses so I could move the machines anywhere in the building
without needing to get MSU‘s central IT staff to reroute the network path. Shortly
after I moved the machines, the new neighbors would complain about the sound
of a ―bee nest‖ in the hall, a complaint that earned our mobile server-room-on-
wheels a title that stuck: ―The Hive.‖
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Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies 127
After two years administering The Hive‘s servers-on-wheels, the university finally
provided WIDE with a more permanent address. Suddenly we had the offices,
meeting space, and storage space necessary to help sustain the kind of long-
term collaborative research WIDE sought to accomplish. But there was just one
major missing component. There was still no room suitable for our servers. The
only candidate we had lacked any external windows and vents. Without
modifications, the room was an oven for computers, cooking them to a slow
death. I looked into modifying the existing space, such as cutting a hole in the
door or installing a vent system, and an official from the MSU Office of Physical
Plant informed me that any structural modifications we did would be in violation
of fire code. To solve this problem Physical Plant wanted WIDE to spend at least
$40,000.00 to upgrade the A/C capability for the entire floor. In other words, to
solve our problem, they wanted us to pay to upgrade the antiquated cooling
system for the entire building. So for the next four years, from 2005 to 2009, the
server room continued to be a semi-official entity. I snaked an A/C tube out into
the hall to cool the room down, and every year and a half a Physical Plant official
would tell me that we‘d need to find a permanent solution to the cooling problem.
Or, in other words, they‘d tell us that we‘d need to eventually pay for a building
upgrade.
One might ask at this point, why do the servers need to be local to the university
network? Can‘t they be collocated off site? Technologically speaking, the
services our servers provide did not need to be a hundred percent local.
However, there is a strong argument to be made that the kind of development
work we were doing necessitated the servers being local. This is true, but
economically and rhetorically speaking the server room is even more valuable as
an institutional argument. From 2003 to 2005, the mobile server room argued
that the research center desperately needed a more permanent physical space
of its own. The hum of The Hive reminded the department chair that WIDE
needed its own space. Because the servers were on the university network, we
were able to create over twelve *.wide.msu.edu domain and hostnames such as,
http:///www.wide.msu.edu, http://kairos.wide.msu.edu, and
http://dev.wide.msu.edu.
The result of this dance between the physical and the virtual is that over the
course of six years our mobile server room was visible to administrators as a
physical space, the migrating server room in four different places, and
simultaneously as a series of university-identifiable virtual places. In addition, a
research center‘s control over its own virtual space necessitates that its IT staff
engage in IT conversations at a much higher level in the university. Rather than
working with the one college-level IT staff member, the research center, from the
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beginning, began to engage with the top-level IT staff in the university. We
regularly had discussions with them about IP blocks, domains, security issues,
and hosting issues. As a result, by 2009 we became the first research center on
campus to collocate our machines in the brand new university hosting facility. We
no longer needed to have our own server room because the university finally
began to provide a facility that met our needs. But, by that time, we had already
firmly established our physical and digital reputation on campus. The server room
no longer made a necessary institutional argument.
As a graduate student in rhetoric and composition, what I took away from this
experience was a greater appreciation for the design and establishment of
institutional space, how that space is acquired, and the complex dialectics of
building a physical space for the digital age. As a rhetoric and composition
scholar, I see this point as essential not only to my own professionalization but
also for the field. I learned that there are complex formulas for acquiring a space
in which temporary spaces can be leveraged to make institutional arguments,
and I learned how virtual spaces can help scaffold toward more permanent
physical spaces. But this can't be done alone. Indeed, extensive communication
and collaboration among stakeholders is required in order to build such a new
infrastructure. This is a type of work that differs from traditional labor in the
humanities, but it is essential in order to establish new research models in our
field. Furthermore these concerns for new forms of research and infrastructure
extend beyond their immediate sphere to questions of how to better prepare
graduates in English studies to think about the kind of collaboration needed to
create the optimal digital infrastructures for teaching, learning, learner support
(e.g., writing centers), and program administration.
UNDERSTANDING GRADUATE PROFESSIONALIZATION AS MOMENTS OF
COLLABORATION: THE WHEN OF INFRASTRUCTURE
Doug Walls
I began the second year of my Ph.D. program by applying for a general graduate
research assistantship at WIDE. I knew that, as an RA, I would help the center
on one or two specific research projects that were already going on and,
perhaps, be a part of the development of new research project start up and
design. As a researcher, I am interested in how ―loose‖ organizations and
networked individuals articulate, assemble, and evaluate what counts as ―work.‖
WIDE‘s interest in supporting writing in loose organizations of people, as
opposed to large bureaucratic organizations, is what motivated me to apply for
the research assistantship. Both WIDE and I are interested in identifying the best
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way to integrate infrastructure, in both the technological sense (tools) and in
terms of the aligning of relationships (social/people), in order to accomplish
tasks. The project I want to discuss here was a comparative study of research
centers focused on writing studies, including WIDE, that was part of an external
review of the center.1,2
I gained access through a variety of informal and formal channels to data on how
different research centers operate. Frequently, I would have had no access to
these accounts without the technological and social access that WIDE provided. I
was particularly fascinated by accounts of failures and struggles. Some of the
accounts I was given were official; most were not. In the aggregate, the accounts
seemed on a surface level to be contradictory. On the one hand, I saw research
centers that did well because of their support of individual researchers and
separate, autonomous projects; on the other hand, I saw research centers that
had failed because of their support of individual researchers and separate,
autonomous projects. After conducting my research, I still was not sure what
made for a successful research center, but I did know one thing: we were doing
something different at WIDE.
My knowledge of WIDE‘s method of operation and the center‘s own growing
pains (see Jim Ridolfo‘s narrative) informs my perspective on my research
findings. How could some research centers do well supporting
individualized/separate projects and some research centers fail at supporting
individualized/separate projects? In my mind, success or failure depends on what
other organizational, technological, and social infrastructures are in place to
sustain research activity. What I understand about how a research center
functions is that its goal must be to build the infrastructure of research. How a
research center, as an institutional body/location, is organized is not as important
as the when of how a research center is organized and created. Research
centers are not so much organizational units as they are systems of activity that
have to be organized in particular ways (by people, IT infrastructures, deans,
etc.) at particular moments (cocktail parties, conferences, budget meetings, NEH
grant announcements). Understanding those elements, the when of a research
center, is understanding the infrastructure of a research center. You might hear
the echo of Kendall Leon‘s narrative here when I say that by infrastructure I do
not mean only technological tools but also organizational and cultural systems of
building, maintaining, and repairing (sustainable) relationships among people that
1 This project was a continuation of the same task the research assistant before me, Kendall
Leon, to whom I am indebted, began. 2 Many of the centers I learned about are units that help individual primary investigators obtain
funding for their projects.
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allow coordinated activity to occur. In my experience, there is no way to
understand the importance of the technological infrastructure as separate from
the cultural/social infrastructure. One needs to drive and support the other.
In the case of a software development project I worked on for WIDE, through the
course of the project I had to develop the infrastructure to tackle the rich,
complicated, and distributed work at key moments. My experience has been that
complex and distributed research activity, and the centers that cultivate such
activity, must constantly build, maintain, and repair infrastructures, both material
(space, computers, economic resources) and social (relationships among
people), be that through organizational structuring, data and technological tools,
or personal and professional activity at the right time. Additionally, I have learned
that building such infrastructure is rhetorically complex, takes a great deal of
time, and must evolve over time. I am not sure I would have developed this
understanding of how or when research centers work without WIDE.
When I came to WIDE, I was not new at working collaboratively on large-scale
research projects, but those projects had been supported by organizational
structuring of social elements and resources in ways that I am not sure I
understood fully. Frankly, I didn't need to understand them. They worked, so why
look under the hood? Those other projects taught me about the importance of
personal and research skills but not about building the infrastructure that
supports that work the way WIDE did. This knowledge has already proven useful
to me in my career, and I am glad to have it.
PROFESSIONALIZATION IN PARTS: COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH
CENTER ACTIVITIES AS PROFESSIONALIZING MATERIAL
Stacey Pigg
My work in the WIDE Research Center took place over the course of my
graduate work at MSU, where I recently earned a Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Writing.
Like most of my co-authors, I did a lot of different things while working in the
center. In this narrative, I will focus on the ways in which the diverse context for
work in a research center not only prepares graduate students to collaborate with
various institutional and community stakeholders but also enables them to
participate in different kinds of scholarly and intellectual activity. I will briefly
explain how varied my own responsibilities were, and I will reflect briefly on the
ways in which graduate students, through this exposure, become agents who
can choose to value and assemble these activities into what we in the center
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often thought of as a ―modular professionalization,‖ in which they choose how to
value, reuse, and build on the multiple experiences and activities.
When I wrote this narrative I was still at WIDE, and I was working on two
computers. On the WIDE desktop computer, I was running NVivo qualitative text-
analysis software to complete inter-rater reliability checks for part of the Take
Two project, which is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Take Two is a two-part research project designed to study the impact of Web 2.0
technologies on museum practice, and I collaborated with a research team on
the part of this project that analyzes discourse created on the Science Buzz blog
maintained by the Science Museum of Minnesota. In that moment, working on
the project meant transferring coded data from an Excel spreadsheet, where our
research team had found it most simple to complete and store analytical coding
while away from the office, and into the ―number crunching‖ software that is
housed in the WIDE office. At the same time, I was on my personal laptop,
toggling between revising this piece of writing about research activity and double
checking the coding on the desktop computer against the personal files of coding
stored on my own computer. This multitasking was typical; completing any given
task in my work at WIDE usually meant coordinating multiple activities using a
diverse set of tools and resources.
Now that I‘ve established that my work for WIDE often entailed multitasking, let
me back up to show how my activity with the research center likewise involved
multiple concurrent projects, goals, activities, and purposes. My RA position with
the Take Two project was not the first job I had done with WIDE, but it was the
one that I contributed to for the longest. Before and while working on Take Two, I
conducted interviews with high school science teachers across Michigan as part
of a contextual inquiry project to help design a Web 2.0 tool that would enable
geographically distributed educators to share ideas, lesson plans, or just
conversations; I taught in an after-school community Digital Media Arts program
for middle schoolers; and I helped design the curriculum for MSU‘s first hybrid
writing class focused on digital writing and social networks.
I‘ve moved through a snapshot of work and a brief overview of other projects I
was a part of at WIDE in order to describe something about the center: The
nature of work in a digital humanities research center like WIDE is complex,
collaborative, and distributed—interpersonally, cognitively, geographically,
disciplinarily, and in terms of tasks. The context for work in WIDE is not singular;
it does not take place only in academic settings, use a single methodological
approach, involve only certain types of people, or participate in one single set of
disciplinary norms. Using my work with Take Two as an example, on a typical
http://www.qsrinternational.com/products_nvivo.aspxhttps://sites.google.com/site/taketwoinitiative/https://sites.google.com/site/taketwoinitiative/http://www.sciencebuzz.org/blog
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day I might have met my project partner, Katie, in a coffee shop to compare
analytical coding for blog threads; another day I might have worked from home
on my laptop compiling what I discovered about museum learning facilitation into
a literature review; the next, I might have found myself on campus chasing down
a signature from a dean to complete a grant proposal. Similarly, the stack of
books on my desk for Take Two ranged from theories of collaborative learning
from the field of education to focused studies of museum practice to
methodological overviews from composition studies.
Participating in work at a center that brings together such a multiplicity of people,
interests, and activities has had some specific benefits. First, it helped me think
about research and teaching situations rhetorically and contextually. For me, this
means that I think about developing approaches to teaching, research, and
reporting research on a case-by-case basis, trying to make them responsive to
the particular people who will benefit from them in the context of their everyday
lives. This often means reading and contributing to discussions outside my field,
through scholarship as well as practitioner and community conversations.
Further, seeing and taking part in a number of collaborative research projects
rather than focusing solely on my dissertation research helped me understand
how different kinds of research and teaching projects morph and change shape
and purpose over time. Before my experience at WIDE, when I read research
reports in journal articles I tended to think of research projects as neatly bound
and simple: an individual researcher notices a problem, thinks up a methodology,
carries it out, writes it up, and voilà. Following multiple projects through different
stages of their development and implementation gave me a richer sense of how
research and teaching must be dynamic and malleable in response to
institutional, intellectual, and collaborative constraints.
Overall, research center activities provide material for professionalization, as
graduate students have the unique opportunity to seek out and participate in the
particular activities that are most useful to their own development and to choose
the extent of their own participation in terms of time and intellectual investment.
In contrast to a situation in which all graduate student participants begin as the
same kind of novices and are initiated into becoming the same kind of
professional experts, I would suggest that the professionalization that happens at
WIDE is much more diverse and flexible. Graduate students choose their
individual levels of participation in collaborative work and tailor what they do to
their own developing needs and interests as they change over time. Graduate
professionalization through WIDE is less a linear movement along a single, pre-
determined trajectory than it is a modular, contextualized, and dynamic set of
activities that graduate students can use toward their own professional ends.
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CONCLUSION: COLLABORATION, RESEARCH CENTERS, AND GRADUATE
STUDENT PROFESSIONALIZATION
In ―‗Tales of Neglect and Sadism‘: Disciplinarity and the Figuring of the Graduate
Student in Composition,‖ Marcy Taylor and Jennifer Holberg (1999) critique
Darryl Hattenhauer‘s 1982 CCC‘s article that figured the teaching
assistant/graduate student as an ―apprentice.‖ Tracing the often self-constructed
master narratives of graduate students as ―‗drudges,‘ ‗slaves,‘ ‗adolescents,‘
‗schizophrenics,‘ and ‗lab rats‘‖ from 1950 onward (p. 608), Taylor and Holberg
argue that the metaphor of graduate student as apprentice emphasizes the need
for graduate student ―training‖ and creates an irony: ―The irony for the field of
composition . . . is that by emphasizing the need for training as a means toward
professionalization and improved status, we continue to exploit a view of
graduate assistants as subordinate‖ (p. 614). They state that the field of
composition has made a small move toward a ―brighter tomorrow‖ (p. 622) since
graduate students are increasingly authoring their own tales (as we do in this
article). But, according to their research, there is still room for improvement, as
advanced graduate students continued to express ―disillusionment, concern, and
ignorance regarding ‗the broader professional realm of rhetoric and composition .
. . professional development issues, job market difficulties, or the transition from
graduate school into the professoriate‘‖ (Miller qtd. in Taylor & Holberg, 1999, p.
623). Over ten years later, issues raised by Taylor and Holberg remain relevant
and unresolved, but a center like WIDE offers a response to the problems that
they pose.
Crisco, Gallagher, Minter, Stahlnecker, and Talbird (2003) also critique the view
of graduate students as ―apprentices‖ (p. 359). They argue instead that
approaches to graduate student professionalization should recognize students as
―teachers and scholars interested in studying the contexts that shape our
collective work‖ (p. 360). Crisco and co-authors offer an experience in a class
where they ―examined various institutional structures and arrangements‖ as a
move toward the ideal professionalization of which they speak (p. 363). We
propose the digital humanities research center model of WIDE as an answer to
Crisco and co-authors (2003) and Taylor and Holberg (1999).
We argue that the digital humanities writing research center, a relatively new and
unique institutional entity, is important for the field of rhetoric and composition
studies and for the future of graduate student professionalization within this field.
While the field‘s most typical professionalization activities historically have been
situated around the first-year composition classroom, the writing center,
assistantships in writing program administration, or research assistantships that
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Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies 134
partner one student with one professor, we argue that a digital writing research
center offers valuable opportunities for professionalization and for the
development of skills that knowledge workers—including scholar-teachers—need
in the twenty-first century. While working at WIDE, each one of us has had the
opportunity to work collaboratively and serve in leadership roles. We‘ve been
able to engage in what Stacey Pigg calls ―complex, distributed work‖ and to
develop what Amy Diehl calls a concern for ―collaboration, usefulness, and
usability‖ in communities within and outside the university.
Like the parable in which an elephant is described as a very different object
depending on which part the narrator is touching, we observe that our narratives
do not offer identical perspectives on WIDE. Indeed, each of us has had a very
different professionalization experience shaped by our project assignments, the
needs of the center at particular moments in time, and our own professional
interests. Nonetheless, there are some important commonalities that emerge
from our narratives—elements that could serve as starting points for future
conversations about digital humanities research and graduate student
professionalization.
Infrastructure
The first common element is recognition of the necessity of infrastructure. In
Stacey Pigg‘s, Jim Ridolfo‘s, Doug Walls‘s, and Martine Courant Rife‘s stories,
the development of a professional orientation toward infrastructure figures as
prominently as it does for Jeff Grabill, co-director of WIDE, in the audio interview
below.
We cannot do twenty-first-century digital humanities work without the correct
digital infrastructure. What Jim Ridolfo‘s narrative shows, however, is that
infrastructure is not simply machines and technology. As is the case with the
center as a whole, the capacity to build infrastructure is as much about people
and collaboration as it is about the acquisition of new hardware.
Interview with WIDE Co-Director Jeffrey Grabill
Jim Ridolfo talks with Jeffrey Grabill about WIDE‘s growth, infrastructure,
institutional relationships, and space. (For transcript, see Appendix A.)
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Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies 135
Space
Related to infrastructure concerns are the politics of space (see Martine Courant
Rife‘s, Jim Ridolfo‘s, Kendall Leon‘s, and Doug Walls‘s narratives). As WIDE Co-
Directors Jeff Grabill and Bill Hart-Davidson knew—and we learned—space is
one of the most contested and valuable aspects of educational institutions. The
equation that space equals power is too simplistic, but it is true that without
space, it is difficult to centralize work in ways that are essential for programs to
thrive. Digital and physical space not only provides a physical sense of
community but also helps to aggregate an ensemble of projects (see WIDE‘s
Current Projects) around a common institutional identity. Space is an important
base for advancing infrastructure, relationships, and research.
Relationships
A theme running through each of our narratives is the importance of collaborative
relationships. This is most visible in the narratives of Kendall Leon, Amy Diehl,
and Stacey Pigg, and we argue that they provide an important question mark for
the future of the field. Collaborative digital humanities research cannot thrive
within the confines of the sixteen-week seminar or traditional (single-author)
models of scholarship and research. Stacey, Kendall, and Amy each show how
the ability to build and maintain good relationships is essential for collaborative
twenty-first-century projects.
Research
Finally, we all learned how to conduct and support collaborative research,
especially in technology-mediated or technology-focused contexts and contexts
that bring academic researchers into contact with community stakeholders and
clients (within and beyond the university). For most English studies graduate
students, learning about research happens only in the classroom. When one gets
to the dissertation, one has to learn on the job how to do research. Research is
messy, and as Jeff and Bill say, always feels as if one is doing it wrong. In the
center, we were given lots of opportunities to learn what research feels like, to
make mistakes within a supportive group of peers and mentors, and to make
significant, meaningful contributions to research projects.
http://wide.msu.edu/projects/
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Collaborative Approaches to the Digital in English Studies 136
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papers.cfm?abstract_id=918822
Taylor, Marcy, & Holberg, Jennifer L. (1999). ‗Tales of neglect and sadism‘:
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WIDE Research Center. (2010). http://wide.msu.edu
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APPENDIX A: TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO INTERVIEW WITH WIDE CO-
DIRECTOR JEFFREY GRABILL
Ridolfo: Do you want to talk a little bit about what the connections are between
infrastructure and relationships? How do you see those two things unfolding?
Grabill: Well, let me say this, and I don‘t know whether this will make any sense,
but, and Bill Hart-Davidson and I both told this story a number of times that
having a research center on this campus almost instantaneously transformed the
relationships we had with other people on campus and made new relationships
possible. Here‘s what I mean by that: once we had a research center and could
describe what the research center did in ways which were intelligible to anyone
else on this campus, they understood a couple things immediately, A) that writing
was a research area, that it wasn‘t just a pedagogical area, that you could
actually research writing and that B) you could actually have a center that did
that. And so the fact of the infrastructure as a piece of infrastructure meant that
we instantaneously got different reactions from relationships we already had and
were able to be part of conversations on campus that would have been
unavailable to us or very difficult for us as individual English or writing
department faculty members. The other part of that is that is the relationship
connectivity and a piece of that is that we could actually leverage infrastructure
on grant proposals, so we brought capacity to teams that makes relationships
possible. And so those are ways that infrastructure makes relationships
possible, I think.
Ridolfo: So do you see this now [November 2009] six years later from the start
of the research center [2003] as happening in stages? So do you think there was
a first stage where there were certain institutional resources you needed in terms
of infrastructure that makes certain relationships possible and then after
achieving that sort of milestone you were able to move on to what we might think
now of as a next step?
Grabill: Yes. So here‘s, sort of, so this isn‘t precisely what you‘re asking but
here‘s the way it worked at least initially for us. In the first phase of the research
center we distributed the infrastructure. So we gave a lot of time and money and
expertise away to individuals and small teams and said, go out, do great work,
publish it, write grant proposals, and try and build WIDE into your work as best
we can help you as you develop that work over the next couple of years.
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That turned out to be for the most part to be a failure. Most of the people we
gave those resources to didn‘t deliver at all. But, it was something that we had to
do for a number of reasons. And so, we had to do it and we learned a lot from it.
But then we pulled the infrastructure back. In a phase two we stopped giving
infrastructure out to people and we kept it internal to the center. And then we just
invited people to work with us. And so we would say hey, we‘ve got this project
and it‘s great for you, do you want to work with WIDE on this project? You be the
lead, we‘ll support you, but we kept all the infrastructure in house and only spent
it fairly frugally as things played out over time.
Ridolfo: Did you see that first round of giving seed money to projects that didn‘t
really have maybe a unilateral focus in terms of the goals of the research center
and the directors as doing a sort of work in terms of representing [WIDE] to the
university community?
Grabill: Here‘s where we pick up. So you asked me about was it necessary to
give it away like that?
Ridolfo: Yeah, I asked you basically if putting the seed money out there and
putting the WIDE resources out there to collaborate with folks in English and
WRAC, Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures [Formerly Department of
American Thought and Languages]…
Grabill: Psychology…
Ridolfo: Psychology…
Grabill: Communication Arts and Sciences…
Ridolfo: Communication Arts and Sciences… that did a sort of institutional work
in terms of representation that was necessary at that moment.
Grabill: Absolutely. I mean that was explicitly one of the things that went on.
One of the arguments that we made to get the Center to begin with was that
MSU had tremendous capacity in this area. That it just needed to be aggregated
and collected and pointed in particular directions, and that one of the things that
a center does is center things. And so, yeah one of the things we were able to
say was gee look at all of this digital writing and digital rhetoric research that‘s
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now getting done on this campus. And we seeded a lot of activity very early and
that activity helped us make institutional arguments. So you look around the
Center at all the posters on the walls, almost all of those posters come from that
first phase where we distributed infrastructure. And again it wasn‘t ultimately
productive in the ways that we wanted to be productive over time, but it certainly
had utility in the immediate phase of the startup.
Ridolfo: So talk a little bit about the second phase. The consolidation of projects
and resources, what work did that do then for the Center?
Grabill: Well, we just got better at our jobs. So what happened was about every
eighteen months we revisit the Center and sort of retask it. And what we decided
to do was when I say pull things in house, what I mean by that is we tightened up
our mission and our focus. And we began to only take on projects that were
research based, that is weren‘t principally outreach or principally pedagogical –
they could have pedagogical tie-ins and often did but they had to be research.
They focus on a key set of issues, so for instance, you know, one of the key
focuses of this research center for two years now has been understanding
knowledge-work, understanding knowledge-work. Boom. That‘s a classic
example of what we did in those follow up phases is we identified a key concept
and we said look, we‘re going to study this key concept for the next couple of
years. And we‘re going to study it. The Center will study it. We‘re going to try and
find people who are doing that work and try to help them and invite them to
collaborate, the Center‘s going to study it. And on some of those projects Bill
Hart-Davidson was the lead, and on some projects I was the lead, and on some
projects graduate students were the lead, other faculty members were the lead
but it was the Center‘s work as opposed to Jeff‘s work supported by the Center.
There‘s a huge difference between those two things.